A Tale Of Two Nazi Jokes: This Late Night Host Keeps His Job, But A Pro-Trump CNN Contributor Gets The Boot

So, Stephen Colbert is not a fan of President Trump. That’s a given, but he landed himself in hot water last May for saying that the president is President Vladimir Putin’s c**k holster. Colbert even was accused of peddling homophobic slurs with that remark. The Federal Communications Commission declined to take action against the comedian. Now, Colbert has decided to become a textbook case in double standards by mocking the Trump administration’s response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia; Colbert was on a two-week vacation, so he was playing catch-up. He was specifically commenting on former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon’s remarks during his 60 Minutes interview over the weekend, where he said that Trump’s response to the tragedy was taking it up to a higher level regarding monuments. White nationalist groups and far left Antifa groups met in the city, where the former was protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from the city. Obviously, a rumble occurred between the two groups and there were no good sides here. There is nothing more that needs to be said about white nationalists and Antifa’s actions were classified as acts of domestic terrorism last year. It was the worst of America duking it out, which left scores of people injured and one woman dead. Yet, Bannon’s remarks prompted Colbert to dole out mock Nazi salutes last week.

Wait a minute, didn’t Jeffrey Lord, who was a pro-Trump commentator on CNN, get fired over this? Let’s take a trip down memory lane. While Lord didn’t do a mock Nazi salute, he mockingly wrote “Sieg Heil” in a Twitter exchange with the president of the liberal Media Matters watchdog group in August (via NYT):

Jeffrey Lord, the indefatigable defender of President Trump whose advocacy turned him into an unlikely political celebrity, was fired by CNN on Thursday after a convoluted Twitter exchange in which he evoked — mockingly, he said — a Nazi salute.

Mr. Lord received the news by telephone while on his way to CNN’s Manhattan studio in a town car provided by the network, which ferried him from his home near Harrisburg, Pa.

After Mr. Lord, 66, learned that his contract had been severed, the car turned around. “I didn’t have to walk; I thanked them for that,” he said in a telephone interview from the road.

While Mr. Lord was often castigated by critics for his relentless lobbying on Mr. Trump’s behalf — he was once rebuked on air by Anderson Cooper in particularly crude terms — it was a social media squabble that led to his ouster.

Mr. Lord had recently accused Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal watchdog site Media Matters, of emulating fascists by calling for sponsors to boycott Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. When Mr. Carusone responded on Thursday on Twitter, Mr. Lord posted the words “Sieg Heil!”, a response that he said was meant to mock Mr. Carusone’s behavior.

The peculiar nature of the two incidents and the end results led Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to question the logic of all of this last week since Colbert will most likely keep his job (no, he definitely will) for doing a mock salute while Lord is fired for merely referencing Nazi Germany. The Hill’s Joe Concha had plenty to say about the matter, though he noted that he mocked Trump’s response to Harvey in his monologue, in which the president visited the state twice. Colbert was on vacation for two weeks and certainly had the wherewithal to do something. He didn’t.

In August, HBO Host Bill Maher also criticized the decision to fire Lord—Colbert had not yet dabbled in mock Nazism at this point—saying that it was part of the political correctness ethos that’s eating liberals like cancer. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who also noted that there is this sort of “puritanism” on the left concerning things you can and cannot say, interviewed Maher, which brought up his defense of Lord’s First Amendment rights (via Real Clear Politics):

FAREED ZAKARIA: It's a really interesting thing I grapple with in America. There's almost a sort of puritanism within the culture that says we're going the shame, we're going to censor, you can't say these things. This is very different in a place like Europe. There's a peculiarity in America on the right and the left, but particularly on the left there is this puritanism, there are things you can't say.

BILL MAHER: And it's getting worse. I don't know how long I'm going to last. Really. I mean it's worse every year. The things that they go after people for now. I mean, your colleague, I don't agree with him, Jeffrey Lord. I mean CNN got rid of him because he said 'Sieg Heil' on a tweet, it was a joke.

This has to stop, this idea of people have to go away if they've offended me even for one moment. How about just move on, turn the page? Go to the next thing in your life?

This idea that you cannot suffer one moment of pain, this comes I think from bad parenting. You know, these are the kids, these are the millennials, sorry, millennials, but these are the kids who grew up yelling at their parents, something that never even crossed my mind that I could do, and parents negotiating everything and this sense of entitlement that I should never feel any pain, even the pain of someone disagreeing with me. It's an alarming number of millennials who really don't even believe in free speech, because you know what, free speech could lead to hurt feelings. Who gave these kids these priorities?

So, I guess only liberals get a free pass in mocking Nazis and calling people with whom they disagree with as such. Yeah, sounds like a pretty typical dynamic among the liberal media establishment.